For half a century, one theory about the way we experience and express emotion has helped shape how we practice psychology, do police work, and even fight terrorism. But what if that theory is wrong?

So there’s no such thing as a basic emotion? It sounds crazy. But this is where all sorts of brain science is headed. Researchers once assumed that the brain stored specific memories, but now they’ve realized that there is no such stash to be found. Memories, the new science suggests, are actually reconstructed anew every time we access them, and appear to us a little differently each time, depending on what’s happened since. Vision works in a similar way. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.

In the spring of 2006, Barrett published a pair of controversial papers. The first, which appeared in the inaugural issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, compiled every argument and question she’d found during the previous 16 years that challenged the “natural-kind view”—her term for Ekman’s theory. “The natural-kind view has outlived its scientific value,” she declared, “and now presents a major obstacle to understanding what emotions are and how they work.” The second paper, which appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Review, sketched out a richer research agenda and promised to resolve the inconsistencies and address the problems that had emerged in the prior 50 years of emotion research.

The papers provoked strong reactions. In many quarters, Barrett was angrily attacked for her ideas, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we’re making,” says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist who studies positive emotions and has debated publicly with Barrett in the past. “There are a zillion data points on a perspective that conforms to Ekman, and the alternative has yet to be documented convincingly.” Keltner told me that he himself has coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman’s system, and the results are strikingly consistent: Certain face-emotion combinations recur regularly, and others never occur. “That tells me, ‘Wow, this approach to distinct emotions has real power,’” he says.

The photographs above were used by Paul Ekman in the 1960s and 1970s as he conducted his pioneering cross-cultural studies of emotion. Subjects were shown the photographs and asked to match what they saw in them to a list of emotions, or stories about emotions. Ekman reported striking results: People all over the world matched the same faces to the same emotions, suggesting that we all express basic emotions in the same way, regardless of age, gender, or culture. From left, the emotions shown above, as described by Ekman, are anger, contempt (modeled by Ekman himself), disgust, surprise, sadness, happiness, and fear.

But Barrett’s papers and her subsequent work have also attracted praise. According to the Stanford psychologist James Gross, they have made her “one of the most important contemporary figures in the field.” Michael Spivey, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced, contends that Barrett is “almost single-handedly taking the field of emotion research into the 21st century.” In 2007, too, the National Institutes of Health unanimously awarded Barrett a Pioneer Grant, as part of an initiative aimed at funding high-risk-high-payoff ideas in science. Barrett received $3.9 million, to be used in her emotion studies however she saw fit. She is only the second psychologist ever to have won the prize.

For his part, Ekman likes to remain above the fray these days. “If you can show Ekman’s wrong,” he said when I asked him about Barrett and others who have attacked his ideas, “you’ll become famous. I’m not saying that’s their motive. I’m only describing the reality.”

Ekman reached the peak of his fame in the years following 2001. That’s the year the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. The next year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about him in the New Yorker, and in 2003 he began working pro bono for the TSA. A year later, riding the updraft of success, he left his university post and started the Paul Ekman Group, a consulting firm that he still runs today, which has taught police departments, law-enforcement agencies, and intelligence-gathering services how to read faces for emotions. David Matsumoto, an Ekman protégé, has provided similar services to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Federal Judges, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and even to doctors at the Mayo Clinic through his own California-based company, Humintell, which he founded in 2009. Both Ekman and Matsumoto have created websites on which you can buy introductory face-reading kits for less than $30.

Ekman and his ideas, in other words, still have a powerful influence on society at large, and scientists in a variety of disciplines continue to rely on his research. But doubts are emerging. In 2010, for example, forensic psychologists at the University of British Columbia reported in Legal and Criminological Psychology that when they’d actually gone looking for the link between the microexpressions of liars and certain universal emotions (the kind of link upon which Ekman’s theory depends), they hadn’t been able to find it. The authors wrote, “We, like most everyone else, it seemed, presumed the firm empirical foundation of the validity of microexpressions in relation to deception. But in 2006, despite reading of anecdotal evidence, we were unable to find any published empirical research on the phenomenon.”

That same year, even the U.S. Government Accountability Office weighed in, releasing a report suggesting that SPOT, the TSA’s behavior-detection program, might have been launched without proper scientific confirmation that its underlying premise was valid. A subcommittee hearing and several follow-up reports later, the program’s status remains uncertain, despite $200 million that has been spent annually on it since 2003. “If governments are buying into notions that are not scientifically sound or empirically supported,” says Maria Hartwig, a deception researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who testified at the hearing, “then I think the money’s being wasted.”

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Arvid Kappas

I am very happy to read about this important issue. This is so well written, that I am sure, many readers will want to know more about this controversy – good starting points would be the work of Alan Fridlund UC Santa Barbara, who pointed out in 1986 that Darwin had never argued for a fixed link between emotions and expressions. An excellent introduction is his 1994 book “Human facial expression: An evolutionary view.”

Jim Russell at Boston College has also worked for many years on these issues and has interesting high-profile research out there, questioning research methods and interpretations of the universality data. He also published a nice book on the topic in 1997 on the Psychology of Facial Expression with Jose-Miguel Fernandez-Dols,

Thank you for pointing out a huge point that was mis-stated in the article — these ideas are definitely NOT new.

Richard Barone

French philosopher Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 and “modern” psychology is just coming around to his ideas. He was right in saying that psychology has some serious limitations.

http://www.facebook.com/cees.timmerman Cees Timmerman

“But in the other three piles, the Himba mixed up angry scowls, disgusted
grimaces, and sad frowns. Without any suggestive context, of the kind
that Ekman had originally provided, they simply didn’t recognize the
differences that leap out so naturally to Westerners.”

How much do the Himba watch angry, disgusted, and sad faces? Do they have TV? Did the researches ask them to demo those emotions?

uniquename72

I did the experiment on myself with the latter half of the first set and the second set of pictures, and I also could not differentiate “properly” without the words being given to me. In fact, I was WAY off. And that’s after 40 years of TV watching.

Any demonstration (or posed photo) is really just a caricature of the emotion, rather than the emotion itself. Most of our emotions are entirely internal and often changeable based on what we’re trying to convey and to whom — which is kinda the point.

clifflansley

The latter part of this article suggests that our recognition/understanding of emotions has been taught. This ignores the work Ekman did in the stone age culture of Papua New Guinea with the isolated Fore Tribe. They both displayed and recognised the core emotions using the same universal triggers – loss of valued object/person = sadness; interference with goals/values = anger; etc.

This research addresses the paragraph early in the article:

“I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

I am interested in seeing good research that support this?

RebeccaSparks

I don’t think it ignores as much as it challenges it. The problem with that Ekman (and other universalists) design close-ended tests with the goal of being able to test cross culturally, but with the close-ended test it ends up shaping the data to fit with the multiple choice answers. That result is what the test with the Himba is supposed to be “good research” that challenges it. Arvid Kappas lists some other sources, but I am not personally familiar with them.

clifflansley

A key part of the work in PNG involved descriptions that correlated with the universal triggers (e.g. “Friends have come” for happiness) and the resulting expressions from genuine emotion matched the cross-cultural database …so not a multiple closed choice.
Please can you point me to the Himba study? I am keen to learn what you are enthusiastic about and see howit counters what the scientific community has supported for so long.

RebeccaSparks

If I’m reading the article we are commenting on correctly, Lisa Berett has finished the study, but is still in process trying to get it published.

But if you’re looking for something already published, there’s plenty cited in this lit. review.

“These reviews do not make the bold claim that emotions are illusions. Instead, they make the more nuanced claim that emotion categories do not have firm boundaries in nature (i.e., emotions are not natural kinds). They demonstrate that behavioral, physiological, experiential and cognitive responses are highly variable within an emotion category, and this variability can be observed even in experiments explicitly designed to produce stereotypical emotional responses. Collectively, the empirical evidence points to the need to explain this observable variability in emotional responding while at the same time understand how human perceivers deal with that variability and experience or perceive discrete categories of emotion (Barrett, 2006b). Do the relatively few positive results come from methodologically superior experiments that float to the top in a sea of misguided empirical attempts? Or does highlighting those studies, while ignoring all the contrary evidence, constitute a case of confirmatory bias?”

He did not speak the language of his subjects. His “translator” did not speak English well. The “stone age” subjects were familiar with white men, and were accustomed to “performing” for

treats and rewards. The pictures used to “illustrate emotions” were completely arbitrarily chosen, by Ekman. The questioning technique involved massive suggestions and biasing context setting, and much, much more.

An excellent article debunking Ekman’s original research was published soon after Ekman’s publication. It eviscerated Ekman’s “study.” By that time, Ekman, having quickly figured out the system, had leveraged his terrible study results for more government funding, and he was off to the races, science be damned!

Here’s the most clinical evisceration of Ekman’s entire “theory” as well as his original “research” in New Guinea:

” Barrett’s researchers would simply hand a jumbled pile of different
expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral) to
their subjects, and would ask them to sort them into six piles.”

They didn’t tell the subjects what they should have based the sorting on so we still don’t know WHY they placed disgust, anger and sadness in the same pile.

David McShane

I wish everyone on this thread would go to Silvan Tomkins (Affect Imagery Consciousness) from whom Ekman got his ideas in the first place. To confuse affect with emotion is fatal to this research.

Elias

So what is the difference between the two?

David McShane

The best way to deal with this is to become familiar with Silvan Tomkins work. His conviction and demonstration that affect biases cognition predates by decades the recent confirmation of that fact by the brain imaging techniques of contemporary neuro-scienteists.

The following may be useful. Goggle this:
Eric Shouse · Respond to this Article. Volume 8; Issue 6; Dec. 2005. 1. AFFECT/A
It depends upon those who knew (somewhat) Tomkins’ work but does not quote from his
main treatment of the subject, in the four volume AFFECT IMAGERY CONSCIOUSNESS

In capsule form one can say AFFECT IS BIOLOGY, EMOTION IS BIOGRAPHY.

The following is quoted from the introduction to volume 1 of Tomkins’ AFFECT IMAGERY CONSCIOUSNESS (published in 1961)* written in the late 1950’s *. Given the fact that this is 50 years old gives it a quite prophetic cast. Tomkins died in 1991. He mentored both Ekman and Carroll Izard in the miulti-cultural affect recognition research.

Following is from AFFECT IMAGERY CONSCIOUSNESS Vol 1 p.5-6.

“It is not just consciousness in general which has been neglected, bu the role of affecdt has also been grossly underestimated. Indeed, we might speculate that the the phenomenon of consciousness might possibly never have been so neglected had the problem been restricted to what another human being thinks. It is rather knowing how he feels that has been most strikingly avoided. This is in part a consequence of the widespread taboos on affect which are learned in childhood.

That Behaviorism slighted the role of affects is obvious, that Psychoanalysis did is less so. But if we trace the development of Freud’s theories chrdonologically, it becomes apparent that affects play a major role in his earlier papers and a successively smaller role as Psychoanalysis evolved. The affects were subordinated to the drives. As in most psychological theories, the drives were concieved to constitute the primary motivational system, and the affects played, but comparison, a lesser role in motivation. It is our contention that exactly the opposite is the case.

In our view, the primary motivational system is the affective system, and the biological drives have motivational impact only which amplified by the affect system. Tis niew is unusual, despite the factt hat the evidence from a wide variety of sources clearly converges towards such a conclusion”.

Steve Shmurak

Elias et al,

To help clarify the difference between
innate-biological affective signals and biographical emotion, I suggest you watch this short video (about
12 minutes) showing the 9 innate affects in infants:

I agree with Elias’s concern: WHY did they place disgust, anger and sadness in the same pile?

One
way of thinking about it is to imagine the varied ways people respond
to shame: some crumple and sadly accept that they are faulty beings
(“attack self”); some put much distance between themselves and the
shaming situation (“withdrawal”); some act like clowns (“shameless”) to
trivialize their participation, or engage in the use of drugs or alcohol
to forget (“denial/avoidance”); some get hostile with actual physical
attack or with the rejection of other implied by an expression of
disgust (“attack other”).

When a psychologist asks, “How are
you feeling?” some people will respond with what they think is going on:
“I feel like she doesn’t like me.” A good therapist might continue
the inquiry with asking the client to locate the feeling in his body.
“I feel sick to my stomach when she looks at me that way,” he might
respond. Continuing to probe, the psychologist might discover whether
there are other similar events in the person’s life, where that bodily
sensation was elicited in a relationship, and if so, explore how that
relationship came to be and how it unfolded. And the upshot might be
that the sick-stomach feeling functions to alert the client that
something is amiss in the relationship, some disconnect that leaves the
client feeling unloved, unwanted, for reasons beyond his comprehension.

It will take much time and interaction with the psychologist
for the client to be able to connect the feeling of “someone doesn’t
like me, and it makes me feel sick to my stomach” with what elements
have gone awry in some significant early relationship, and then to
connect that experience with a current relationship that has at least
this one aspect in common with the early one. And then to connect that
insight with his own way of participating in relationship with
significant others, so that he might consider developing other ways to
relate and/or to make better choices in whom to be in relationship
with–when he’s ready to make those changes.

Then there’s the
ability to tolerate the sick-to-stomach feeling as one goes about trying
out new relationships, and using that feeling as information that one
needs to elicit feedback from the other(s) with whom one is in
relationship.

What does this have to do with facial display? So
what if I look disgusted (only slightly) when you approach me? A lot
depends on your ability to inquire into my feelings, doesn’t it? What
action to take? You could crumple into sadness, or run away, or take a
drink so as not to notice, or get mad at me–or inquire.

Inquiry–tolerating
unpleasant feelings and adopting a healthy Interest, rather than
dissolving into a load of negative feeling–is where learning about
Affect Script Psychology has taken me.

This is a great piece, and a nice reminder that all research is subject to new understanding and improvement.

There seem to me to be three things at play:

1. Do facial responses represent an instinctual emotion? Maybe not in all cases, but no data could ever convince me that my 6 month old’s instantaneous facial expression of “yuck” when trying certain new foods is a manifested expression designed to communicate something to me rather than an instinctual internal emotional reaction to the taste of the food.

2. Do all culture’s read facial expressions and corresponding emotions exactly the same way? I think it is pretty clear that exactly how an experiment is conducted can lead to different conclusions on this point. However, I think it is hard to argue that there isn’t some classification level — maybe only a two-to-four (may be less) facial-emotional states that wouldn’t be interpreted the same way.

3. What’s really going on behind the facial expression-emotion connection? This is clearly the place where it seems clear to me that individual human experiences play a role. The “why” behind a facial expression and an emotion it might reflect are hugely influences by experience and context.

SixnaHalfFeet

This all reminds me of Shrodingers Cat. Perhaps emotions are a quantum state that is not known until an observation is made? Or the act of observation effects the outcome?

Isn’t the crux of Ekman’s work that emotion presents itself in universal ways, not that it is understood the same universally?… It feels like neither she nor the writer of the article have read Ekman’s work (they may have, but the article is heavily skewing stuff).
It says it’s not a matter of semantics, but if we named a frown-y face as Orange, and smile as Banana and used fruits to label all emotions instead of Anger, Disgust etc. it feels like it would start to fall apart,
I mean while someone may not be able to describe or interpret what they’re feeling as Happiness, a smile is ALWAYS a reaction to something positive for that person and while what is positive to one person is completely subjective for example a killer getting pleasure from someone else’s death, that their reaction to smile, I think, seems pretty standard.

And in this day and age, for research to be dismissed seems like it says something about the research. This isn’t, after all, the 1800’s and she isn’t John Snow battling the whole word on miasma theory, it feels like there’s more than a little self-martyring going on on her behalf.

kentclizbe

Shane,

Sorry, but you’re not right.

A smile is NOT always a reaction to something positive. In many Asian cultures, smiles indicate discomfort and embarrassment.

And that’s just one example of the multitude of cultural differences that exist in facial expressions.

For the ultimate in eviscerating Ekman’s horribly flawed theory, “research” approach, techniques, and continuing marketing of his “results,” see James A. Russel’s extensive critique of the New Guinea study, here: